


It's weak. (But there's nothing left to loose.)

by ftwnhgn



Series: no written guidelines. [2]
Category: Spring Awakening - Sheik/Sater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Depression, F/F, Germany, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Recovery, Self-Hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-19
Updated: 2017-02-19
Packaged: 2018-09-25 15:41:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9827012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ftwnhgn/pseuds/ftwnhgn
Summary: It’s supposed to get easier.Why did it never get easier? Why does it seem to get harder with more and more time between his life back then and now?“I miss him,” Melchior says, so quietly that Hanschen can’t be sure to have picked it up.Or: The three times Melchior Gabor believed and four of the endless times he didn't.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title and inspiration from Last Week's Alcohol from Kerrigan and Lowdermilk. Andy Mientus' rendition of the song is utterly heart-wrenching and I love it so much.
> 
> Why I wrote something about Melchior? I don't know. Why I wrote about Melchior suffering? Well, that's easier to explain. I can't really stand him (most of the times) but he's a fascinating character and I love his character development (plus, he get's the best songs, duh). Austin's portrayal is everything and it still has me shook. That be said, this piece of work is really sad and shows unhealthy coping mechanism and grieving attempts, as well as depression, people having mental breakdowns and their bodies responding very unhappily with how they treat themselves. And if you couldn't tell, the 'they' in our case is Melchior Gabor.
> 
> My favourite of them all, Hanschen Rilow, is our greatest guest star in this story. I love him dearly. 
> 
> This is completely un-beta'd, freshly finished and written by a person who is no native speaker, but german. That's why all of this plays in Germany and follows the german school system (just for your background knowledge) and that's also why, if I mess up any tenses or there are grammatical errors, I am sorry. I try to do my best.

_"This is how it feels to fall in love._  
_T_ _his is how it feels to fall._  
_The weakness, the sadness, the sirens, the madness._  
_The pounding in your chest,_  
_like you’re racing the streets in an ambulance._  
_I’m watching you. I’m watching me._  
_I’m watching us fall."_  
\- Kerrigan and Lowdermilk

_***_

 

 

His phone vibrates in his pocket, but it always does these days.  

Melchior ignores it while maneuvering through the thick crowd of people until he’s in the backyard. While he still bothers with house parties when they’re not his thing anymore, he doesn’t know. It became a habit in college and stuck with him to have something to do. Wendla drags him to practically anything a friend of hers or them asks her to go to, and this is no difference.

His phone keeps on vibrating.

Could be Wendla, _obviously_ , asking where he went. Could be Ilse, asking him where Wendla is and why she’s not answering her calls. Could be his mother since he stopped answering her phone calls during weekdays, which still makes her go frantic. Could be godforsaken Hanschen Rilow asking him some shit about the most trivial matter because he likes to annoy Melchior that way, never stopped with the habit once it started in Grammar School. Even made him nearly valedictorian, but only nearly.

Melchior had some promises to hold back then, so, of course, he buried himself in his work and kept on being best in class. Slaving himself away for academic purpose has been his only real talent back then. Still is. Just like there are still promises to keep for him he doesn’t see breaking any time now.

He tilts his head back and looks up at the sky. It’s his own way of torture, in some way or the other, and he knows it’s no good, looking for patterns and signs that just aren’t there.

He lost his faith years ago. Sometimes he wonders if he even had a sense of faith to begin with.

His mother would say so.

But his mother always believes in the good in people, and never stopped believing in the good in _him_. Although he became a father with, what, sixteen and although he messed up at both schools he went to and although he was the reason for-

 _No_ , he’s not doing this to himself tonight.

If Melchior would have one free wish, he would ask any higher power to make him dumb, or, at least, less intelligent. Only intelligent people are unhappy, they tend to overthink everything and they tend to ask too many questions and they tend to brag and shout and never learn.

They tend to look at the stars and see an answer in them despite it all.

Like he used to.

 

*

 

Slow kisses trail up Moritz’s neck and when Melchior can hear him take a shaky inhale he grins against the other boy’s jaw.

“We need to study!” Moritz exclaims and tries to push Melchior away, who is having none of it and just leans more into him, his whole body pressing against Moritz’ side now, grabbing for the Latin textbook and throwing it across the bed.

“You’re a menace, Melchior Gabor.” Moritz huffs out but a soft laugh follows his sentence, and then he leans back down onto the bed.

Melchior takes this as his cue to climb on top of his best friend and to kiss him for real this time. Moritz’ engages eagerly and grabs around Melchior’s shoulder, his mouth sweet and warm and just as open as his whole posture is. They go like this for a while in the usual fashion of restlessness only Melchior can bring out in Moritz. Soon enough Melchior’s shirt is lying on the floor and Moritz’ nails dig into the skin on his back in that way that makes Melchior want to devour him and never let him go – which he plans on anyway – and Melchior sucks a mark into Moritz’s neck in response, grins against the reddening skin before he trails back down to kiss every part of Moritz he can reach.

Really, he could kiss Moritz, whisper Latin words against his lips and feel his hands on him for hours on end without ever getting bored or tired. It’s the opposite of going to church, he’s so much more awake and alert and goddamn joyful when he’s on top of Moritz that it should become an own branch of science, because Melchior is sure no one on this earth has ever felt the way he does.

“I love you."

It’s a shocking realization for a teenager and Melchior never really believed in all that mumbo jumbo about true love, white weddings and until death do we part under the Heavenly Father’s promise, but he feels like he will die if he won’t tell Moritz right now. So, he stops and draws his head up again, until he can look Moritz in the eyes.

The other boy doesn’t seem to have heard what Melchior just breathed against his collarbone or doesn’t want to believe him because his brows are knitted together in confusion and no response to Melchior’s words is coming from him.

“I love you, Moritz,” Melchior repeats himself, clearer and a bit louder this time, his eyes not leaving Moritz’s face.

Moritz answer is him tearing up visibly and then throwing his arms back around Melchior to push him down until he can bury his face into Melchior’s naked shoulder.

 _Well_ , okay. That was not the reaction Melchior has expected.

“No, Melchior, you don’t,” is the soft sob into Melchior’s skin.

Melchior stops dead and frees himself out of Moritz’ iron grip to sit himself up. Moritz hasn’t cried, thank God, because Melchior is not great at handling that – but his face is a mirror of his distress and it’s a tragedy that Moritz can’t even believe Melchior when Melchior just put into words what he has felt in the past few weeks whenever they spent time alone.

“Melchi, you just don’t believe in the church and that’s, that’s why-“

Moritz and his stubbornness and lack of self-confidence will be the downfall of them all, Melchior is sure of that. And on any other given day he would let his best friend sulk and sob and throw a fit but today he’s having none of it, not when it’s about him.

“No, Moritz. I love you,” Melchior repeats himself, _again_ , slowly. “And I wanted you to know.”

“But what about Wendla?” Moritz asks, trying to find the damn nail for his own coffin like no one else could.

Melchior rolls his eyes. “Nothing’s about her. I don’t love her,” he answers.

Moritz doesn’t really look convinced.

“I do _not_ love her, Moritz. I love you.” Melchior emphases and kisses Moritz deeply, his best attempt to shut him and his troubling thoughts up.

“I love you too, you know,” Moritz says between more kisses, his hands at the back of Melchior’s neck to hold him. “Have for a long time, actually.”

Melchior smiles. “I know.”

 

*

 

He’s sitting on the bathroom floor of his own flat. The tiles are colder than he thought but, not moving for God knows how long, Melchior can’t really complain about the temperature of his bathroom floor, instead more about the stiffness in his joints, especially his knees.

Getting up is no use, it will just take a few minutes until he’s retching into the toilet bowl again like there’s no tomorrow. He rests his forehead against the white tiles on the wall right next to the porcelain and breathes in through his nose, counts some random numbers in his head in hope to finally calm down. How does he explain to his mother that he’s twenty-five and doesn’t have his life together at all? That he’s spending his Sundays having a mental breakdown when he can hear the church bells from down the street?  
  
He stopped answering her calls on weekends, too. She’s not thrilled about that, understandably, but Melchior can’t get himself to pick up his cellphone when it’s sitting on the nightstand and he’s busy with puking his guts out, or what’s left of them. His therapist said it’s just a bad phase again, just his usual depressive episode but a bit worse, said that triggers can do that to oneself and especially with February coming to a close it’s normal he’s more vulnerable for something like this to happen. And, hey, two years ago it was all much worse, so he can do this.

It’s nice that everyone around him is so sure of him being alright and getting better when Melchior feels like he tried to get better for ten years in a row now without any sign of it really working out well. Even Ilse, out of all people the one who had it the hardest, could move on, could march forward and could keep that small sliver of hope they all had back then alive, fostered it until it was in her bloodstream and the main source of her survival.

Maybe it’s because she’s just wired that way. Maybe Melchior could never be like that as well because he’s wired differently. Predetermined for disaster.

His academic career never suffered, of course it never did, or took a blow because when there is one thing on this earth Melchior _can’t_ fuck up, even if he tries to – and he tried – then it’s his climb to success. He marched through school like his life depended on it and dragged himself through college like somebody had a knife under his jaw every waking minute and it’s the same with his job, but with less assignments and more income, or an income in general, for that matter. Everything in his private life keeps on falling apart and not getting back together while he went from head of his classes to assistant, then to lecturer and then to professor and doctor in the shortest amount of time humanly possible.

From the outside, he must seem incredibly perfect, Melchior thinks, while the next wave of nausea is coming over him and his neck aches from bowing his head down again and again. From the outside, his students think he’s amazing. Or at least an amazingly teaching asshole.

From the inside, Melchior rots away more with every year he has to spend on his own. With every passing year, he feels less like himself and less like going on.

Holding up promises has lost the appeal.

 

*

 

House parties are not as cool as they always appear when you’re a pre-teen and Melchior only sticks through with them because of his friends and because it gets Moritz to socialize in a way that is more than just two sentences in class he says to Ernst because Melchior sits too far away to help him.

Now Ernst is pretty busy with getting his face eaten off by Hanschen Rilow, so Moritz is staying at Melchior’s side, his hands nervously fidgeting with his jacket for minutes already, until Melchior can’t take it any longer and takes one of them in his and puts a cup of some mixture Ilse prepared into Moritz’ other one. It earns him a slightly shocked look, but Melchior waves it off and leans closer to Moritz to shout over the techno beat into his ear.

“Relax. It’s not the first time you’re at a party and it’s just Georg’s birthday!”

Moritz bites down onto his lip, the worry not leaving his face like Melchior hoped, but he nods.

“I try, it’s just-“ he shouts back but cuts himself off when Thea stumbles into them.

Melchior reaches out to steady her while Moritz grasps her arm so the bottle in hear hand doesn’t fall onto the floor. It takes a few seconds in which all three of them are busy with grounding Thea and then she snaps her head up to stare intensely at the two boys.

“You two,” she starts, letting go of at least Melchior’s grip to point her index finger at first at Moritz and then at him. “You two are a matching set, ain’t it so? Can’t catch one without the other, not even on a casual Saturday night.”

She keeps on looking at them without saying anything else until Martha comes over and carries her away from them, a concerned look on her face.

“Now, that _wasn’t_ weird at all,” Melchior states once they made it to the kitchen and he sits down onto the counter while Moritz leans back against it right next to him.

“That’s what I meant,” Moritz starts, staring into the cup in his hands. He hasn’t taken a sip yet. “What I wanted to say, before she ran into us,” he says and his voice is low, a bit shaky even. If he’s going to cry at a house party Melchior has no idea if their friends will ever let him live it down. “You know, we’re never apart. Not one day, not since we were like, I don’t know, seven? Something like that.”

Melchior has no idea where this is going, but he soothingly runs his hands through Moritz’ hair – always unruly, always working against him, always incredibly soft and such a dark and rich shade of brown that Melchior used to be jealous of when he was younger and complained to Wendla about for a year – in an attempt to ground the other boy, let him know he’s here.

“That’s how it’s supposed to be, Moritz. I got you and you got me.”

Moritz laughs and it sounds like shattering glass.

“No, no, it’s not,” he says, a bitter tone lacing his voice. “That’s how it’s now, because we’re living door to door and you said you love me and I said it back. But once you graduate and are off to college to change the world or something, what will I be? I will only drag you down and you can’t need that, Melchi.”

Melchior knows better than to let his grip reinforce, so he moves his hand away from Moritz’ head and to his shoulder. He’s taking a deep breath in and then one out and tells himself to not get mad now. He does not go off on Moritz, that never happens, and it won’t happen now just because his heart wants to feel hurt by Moritz’s doubts.

“Moritz, how often do I have to tell you I love you and that I don’t want to leave you until you believe me?” Melchior says instead and motions with a pat of his hand that Moritz should turn around.

The other boy does, situating himself right between Melchior’s legs, but the moment lacks any bit of sexual tension for this to lead anywhere. They’re not Hanschen and Ernst, they can’t ignite stuff like this out of the blue. But Melchior is thankful for that, it makes the more serious moments like this much easier. Plus, he would rather be caught dead than to openly compare himself to Hanschen Rilow out of his own free will.

Moritz doesn’t answer, just looks at the table top between Melchior’s thighs and it’s not helping the situation when Moritz is not talking to him when talking is the usual way for Melchior to solve his issues.

“C’mon, look at me, Moritz.”

It takes a few seconds but the other boy lifts his head and his eyes meet Melchior’s.

“You’re enough for me, okay? I don’t know what will happen, but right now I want to be with you and I don’t want this between us to end. You’re still my best friend, Moritz, and I’m not planning to let my best friend go anywhere without me or go anywhere without him. You got this? Because I won’t say it again. I love you and you love me and no one is going anywhere because we come as a matching set. That’s how it’s supposed to be and that’s not going to end if I can’t help it.”

Melchior leans down and Moritz simultaneously drags him down by the collar of his shirt until they meet in a kiss that holds every word Moritz can’t bring himself to say and Melchior can’t phrase eloquently, and for a short moment Melchior is sure that what they have will still last when humanity has moved on to bigger and better things.

 

*

 

He’s ripping the page out of the calendar and throws it in a fit of rage across the room. The paper crumbles onto the floor too peacefully for his liking, so he grabs the next thing in his reach – a bottle – and hauls it across the room. The glass splits up into pieces in a loud and sickening noise that makes him draw his eyes shut and wince.

“Are you finished?”

Hanschen Rilow is standing in the doorway, looking unimpressed as ever, dressed in a tailored suit with his blond hair styled to perfection.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Melchior snaps and is close to throwing another thing. Closest to him is a vase full of wildflowers Ilse and Wendla brought by when they visited two days ago. Despite the sentiment, Melchior considers throwing it at Hanschen’s dumb blonde head.

“We had an appointment. _Today_ , you know. To go through the grading system for the essays. Did you forget that?” Hanschen responses and crosses his arms in front of his chest. Not in defense – Hanschen doesn’t do stuff in defense – but to broaden his posture. He looks so put together, so in tune with his surroundings, as if the world answers his every command. As if today isn’t the worst day of the whole year.

Melchior hates everything about it.

Hates how everyone can go on and live their life except for him.

He doesn’t answer Hanschen’s question, but the image he seems to strike is answer enough for the other man to leave his position against the door frame and to move over to Melchior.

“Look,” he begins, his hand carefully resting on Melchior’s shoulder to unstiffen his drawn-in posture. Melchior hasn’t even noticed how uncomfortable he was standing. “It’s okay if you’ve forgotten it. We can do it another day this week, as long as you won’t forget it again. I will tell the dean you needed some off days, he will understand. But you could have shot me a message, like, yesterday if you were feeling unwell. Ernst had something planned for today and I had to drop out ‘cause I promised him and Wendla to help you.”

Hanschen Rilow pitying him is something Melchior never wanted to experience again in his life, yet here he is, getting that horrible soft look from him that’s only reserved for Ernst and Wendla and that Melchior has seen only once directed at him in the time they’ve known each other. So, he draws himself back up into full stance with the little pride he’s got left in him and ducks out under Hanschen’s grip to stay a hand’s length away from him.

“No, it’s alright,” he says but the look Hanschen is giving him is tells him he’s not sounding convincing.

“Melchior,” Hanschen interrupts him. “It’s not alright and today clearly is the wrong day for you get anything done. There’s no use of me being here when you’ll just keep on throwing things at the walls and scream at the world. It’s not helping anyone, least of all you. Plus, I could spend today very differently because, face it, you’re not the only one who’s affected by this and I have a very much living husband at home who is grieving in his own way and who needs me more than you need me and we both know it.” 

The guilt Melchior feels at hearing these words is enough to make him want to puke again, but he has the strong feeling that Hanschen wouldn’t tolerate him more than he does now when he throws up over his shoes.

“So, you have two options,” Hanschen keeps going. “You’re either going to act like a healthy human-being and accept my help when I present it to you, because I’m not running around and throwing it at people like you on the daily, or I can walk right out of the door without informing anyone about your terrible conditions and you can haul more shit away from you without improving anything. Understood?”

Melchior nods, too defeated to pick a fight with Hanschen right now.

“Good. You’re going to sit down right there. I’m calling Wendla to come over and take care of you and then I’m ordering you some food because you really look like shit. Try to keep it in, I’m not throwing my money around-“

“Which _I_ know as well,” Melchior finishes the over-used sentence for Hanschen, which makes the blonde smile curtly.

“You’re clever, Gabor, I’ll give you that. Always have been,” Hanschen responses while he’s already putting his phone to his ear, waiting for Wendla to pick up.

Yeah, he’s clever but that never did him any good, so the compliment is lost somewhere between them, never really reaching Melchior in the way it’s intended. His intellect got him where he is now and if he’s starting to reflect where right now is, it’s not what he imagined ten years go. Everything was supposed to be different. He was not supposed to be alone. They were supposed to be _together_. A matching set. He was supposed to be happy, for God’s sake, not to have a complete mental breakdown once a year because he just can’t deal with everything that happened. Because he can’t deal with him being gone, just gone. Grief is not supposed to stay in one’s life, it’s supposed to fade away over time. Everyone moves on with their life until it’s a dull pain that shows itself twice a year at most. It’s not supposed to manifest itself into your chest until you can’t stand the beating of your heart and the heaving breaths you take. Or into your head until your thoughts are nothing but poison and rid of any joyful memory you ever harbored over the years. It’s not supposed to be the only thing left in you until there’s nothing left to you besides it.

It’s supposed to get easier.

Why did it never get easier? Why does it seem to get harder with more and more time between his life back then and now?

“I miss him,” Melchior says, so quietly that Hanschen can’t be sure to have picked it up.

But “I know” is the short response and when Melchior looks up, Hanschen looks infinitely tired. “But beating yourself up over this is not what he would have wanted. He would have wanted you to go on, just like you always bragged about, and to do all the things you planned to do on your own. He would have wanted you to be happy.”

Melchior has nothing to say to this. He knows Hanschen is right, but he can’t bring himself to admit it.

“I think it’s time for you to be happy,” Hanschen says. “To let the past be past.”

 

*

 

They’re lying in the grass and it’s dark all around them except for the stars and an occasional phone screen when one of them is checking for a message or to know how much time has passed since they lied down.

“Did you already see something?” Moritz whispers against Melchior’s cheek.

Melchior shakes his head. “No,” he answers. “But the sky is pretty clear, so any minute now.”

Moritz doesn’t say something, but nestles himself more into Melchior’s arms and lays his head onto the other one’s shoulder, his nose brushing the skin under Melchior’s jaw and Melchior already knows that Moritz won’t contribute much to the stargazing from this point on. He’s alright with that. Having Moritz next to him is enough to make this night a good one. Summer night skies aren’t the best ones for Melchior’s hobby but he can barely get Moritz to come with him to stuff like this in general and dragging him out in the middle of winter because it’s the best time to see the stars clearly is a bit insensitive, even for someone like him. That means he has to make use with what he gets tonight.

The sky is finally dark enough to see the stars and Moritz is a comfortable warmth against him, his breathing soft and steady to not interrupt Melchior in his task. Soon the first thing Melchior can see is the milky way and, just as he read, the first constellation he can see is the swan, which is in the middle of it. A bit above is the lyre and close to it is Hercules. After searching for a bit, Melchior can even detect the summer triangle and he makes a mental note to write it all down in his notebook once he finds the time.

“Found anything great already?” Moritz murmurs sleepily into the crook of Melchior’s neck.

Melchior draws his gaze away from the night sky and onto Moritz’s resting features. His best friend has his eyes closed and his soft breath tickles Melchior every time he breathes out, but he looks so peaceful in that moment – a state Melchior has never seen him in while he is awake – that Melchior’s heart makes that dumb thing where it skips a beat just to pick up at a faster pace, his chest feeling like a steel drum during church mass.

“Sure,” he answers and bows his head down to kiss Moritz shortly. “Didn’t have to look at the sky for it though.”

Moritz swats him away in good-fashioned manner, now a bit more awake than before, because when Melchior catches his hand he laces their fingers together and rests them back down onto the grass.

“You’re an idiot,” he says. “And a charmer.”

Melchior snorts.

“And I love you. But keep on looking for the stars, or it won’t have been worth it.”

“I love you too, Moritz,” Melchior answers and if it would be possible, he would catch this moment with his hands and put in a jar so he never forgets how happy he is and how calm his boyfriend looks right now.

He never wants to let this go, Melchior thinks, and doesn’t look at the sky once more.

 

*

 

He’s still staring at the night sky when his phone vibrates again.

The noise of the party is a faint rhythm in the background behind him just as the motion of the phone in the pocket of his coat. He’s wondering when not saying no to Wendla became a bad habit instead of a well-meant intention, but that must have been when they were between ten and eleven and Wendla wanted to be a pirate queen alongside Ilse instead of Melchior’s wife. Didn’t do him any good in the long run, but when did any of his decisions ever?

 He feels like he’s been an outsider, a mere bystander, in his life for the past ten years or so. He just lets things happen to him and deals with them as they come, his streak of self-control spiraling out of its control the moment his mother told him that his best friend shot himself in the head and didn’t make it despite the attempts of the paramedics.

It’s like looking through fogged glass at a stage play you’re the lead role of, with no possibility to get onto the other side and interfere when someone fuck’s up.

Since Moritz left him Melchior’s insides have slowly been decaying while his mind became busier with working on its own. It’s his body who has given up on him long before his mind could catch up with what is going on and when it figured it out, it was too late to save anything of him anyway.

He’s fine this way. He arranged himself with it, just like he did with anything else in his life.

He’s not looking for love like Hanschen does, or for happiness and joy like Wendla does, or for validation like Georg does.

He’s just looking to get by every new day.

It’s weak, he knows this, but there’s nothing left for him anyway.

His phone keeps on vibrating and he can hear footsteps behind him, but Melchior keeps looking at the stars although they stopped telling him the answers for his questions a long time ago. He doesn’t belief in angels and he never believed in anything holy his whole life. He’s not the type and won’t start with it now.

Tomorrow he will wake up and he will face the day just like he did all those times before and he will look at the calendar and the flowers on his kitchen table and, maybe, if he’s lucky, he can drop the coat for a lighter jacket.

The man on the news this morning said that spring is about to come. And when Melchior looks up at the sky, he can see the first traces of the summer triangle buried inside the milky way and he wonders, for one short moment, if Moritz ever saw it too.

“He did,” Hanschen’s voice is calm and when Melchior turns around, he can see him and Ernst standing a few feet away from him. Ernst nods.

A breeze drifts by and Melchior pushes his hair out of his eyes.

“Whatever you’re asking yourself, he did. He didn’t tell you, but he did.” Hanschen repeats.

Melchior smiles, everything else forgotten except for the feeling of just _knowing_. “I hope so.”

**Author's Note:**

> Moritz deserved better, case closed.
> 
> There is a lot to say about the last scene and about what it all means (to me) but I'll leave it up to yourself to think about it what you want.
> 
> thank u for reading this, it means a whole lot to me. you can leave a comment or chat with me on tumblr (andreinbolkonsky) or twitter (xbigboysdontcry) where I keep the spring awakening and sadness vibes going.
> 
> friendly reminder: you are loved, you are enough and you will achieve great things. you are right just the way you are, a living and breathing thing. keep going.


End file.
